Currently, the whole globe is faced with serious problems which negatively affect people around the world: increased pollution, excessive waste, and weather pattern changes. ?Left? and ?right? wing political parties alike have embraced ?green? politics and for many of these parties, environmental issues have become a top priority that is very much reflected in their manifestos. This study examines the environmental goals of two of Sweden?s largest political parties and how these ambitions are reflected at a local level.

The Swedish system of environmental quality objectives is a so-called MBO, Management By Objective and has the purpose to guide the Swedish society towards sustainable ecological development. The system involves the whole society from the parliament and the government down to individual citizens. At the regional level, it is the county administrative boards that are responsible for the work with the system of environmental objectives. At the County Administrative Board of Västmanland County, it is the environmental unit who is in charge of work with the environmental objectives and they want input for how to improve their work with the environmental objectives, both internally at the Administrative Board and externally with external parties.The main purpose and goal of the study is to present the work of four other county administrative boards regarding their work with the environmental quality objectives and to identify external parties? opinions of how they want the County Board of Västmanland county to work with them in this matter.The work is designed as a case study of four county councils, where the environmental objectives coordinators at the four county administrative boards were interviewed about their work with environmental quality objectives.

Music today is a big part of a person's everyday life and can influence emotions as wellas initiative and motivation. This effect together with development in technology hasled to that music today is accessible and can be played from a large amount of differentkinds of products. This in turn has meant that the demand for smaller audio playbackdevices is greater than ever.The goal of this project is to develop a concept for energy-efficient speakers withwireless communication that has the ability to obtain and play high quality music. Thespeakers will use the latest available technology and at the same time, using digitalsignal processing, have a low environmental impact through high energy efficiencyand low power consumption. Parallel to this work a pilot study will be conducted tosee trends in listener preference of sound.The result achieves the goals pledged while power consumption in sleep mode is solow that they meet the demands of tomorrow.

Today, we live in a consumption society. We buy products to soothe our needs and desires. Thru material things we can express our own personal identity and shopping is seen more as a pleasure than a need to survive. With the background media- and communication studies, the reason of this study was to explore how blogs as a social medium can influence the consumption ideal in society. With dialogical analysis and semiotic analysis we wanted to see if we could find a specific consumption culture in the content of six blogs we did our studies on. We found that the blogs showed us that there is normal to have everyday luxury and spoil oneself with expensive things.

Global warming is generally recognized as one of the major environmental challenges we have to face in the near future. The students in school today are the ones that will have to deal with the consequences of it tomorrow. That is why education about it is so important. Previous research shows that students believe that environmental issues in general are important problems to be solved. I this study I tested students in grade twelve, in four different schools in order to find out what their level of knowledge about global warming is, how worried they are about it and if there are any correlation between their knowledge and their level of worry.

Every plan and program decided on by an authority or municipality, where the environmental impact can be considerable, must be environmentally assessed according to Environmental Code, the Planning and Building Act (PBA) and the Regulation on Environmental Impact Assessment.The purpose of this study is to examine the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for The Region Development Plan for the Stockholm Region, RUFS 2010. The plan was approved by at that time the Regional Planning Office (Regionplanekontoret), which procured the process by consultants. RUFS 2010 includes two merged plans ie. a regional Development Plan (RUP) and the Regional Spatial Plan for Stockholm. It was necessary to establish an environmental assessment of RUP, but not for the regional plan.

The aim of my thesis was to do a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of an average thread tap that is manufactured by Dormer Tools AB, and to create a practical model that the company can use in order to study other thread taps from an environmental perspective.The method of LCA is used to investigate the environmental effects of a product during its life cycle. This is a gate-to-grave analysis with focus on steel and thread tap manufacturing, coating procedure, use, waste management and transports. Three common coating types were compared separately. Steel manufacturing answers for the highest energy and raw material consumption under the life cycle of the thread tap. Its emissions contribute to global warming, acidification and eutrophication above others.

A trend since the early 90?s has been that some public libraries offer a special shelf containing environmental information to the community, but it seems as though the subject has been overlooked by the literature and the science community. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to study how three independent public libraries work with environmental information that is made available to the community. The following questions were addressed: 1) Which arguments can be found as to why the libraries offer this activity? 2) How does the environmental work at the public libraries look and what does it contain of? 3) Are there any similarities or differences in this work between the three libraries?To answer these questions interviews with librarians were carried out; observations were made to complement the interviews.

ABSTRACT Behavioural problems are a compound conception for emotional difficulties at different levels. Individuals with behavioural problems could have difficulties with social relations, low self-esteem, anxiety and worry. The purpose with the examination was to describe how clients apprehend their behavioural problems and what they consider could be the causes of it. The examination was based on the qualitative interviews with 5 clients and a professional helper. We came in contact with our clients through our practice.

This thesis calculates and compares the values of improved environmental quality due to future possible investment alternatives in biogas production facilities at Käppalaförbundets Reningsverk (Käppala Sewage Treatment Works) in an attempt to determine which alternative yields the highest such value. Käppala faces three investment alternatives for the usage of biogas. The alternatives are production of vehicle fuel, district heating and thirdly, heat and power production. Estimates of the value of environmental change are calculated for each of the three investment alternatives, and these estimates are then compared. The environmental change in question is the change in discharge levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and particle matter.

In Sweden, responsibility for the collection and recycling of packaging and newspapers lies with the producers. Therefore, the major producers created a jointcollection with 5800 recycling stations. The stations are the responsibility of a coordinating body, Förpacknings och Tidningsinsamlingen (FTI) which ensures Government regulations are adhered to by the producers.In 2006, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carried out an evaluation of the collection of packaging and newspapers. EPA´s research showedthat 80 percent of households were satisfied with the collection but that there were also shortcomings, including problems with littering at the recycling stations.We have tried to approach the litter issue from different angles in order to suggestpossible measures to reduce the problem. An important aspect proved to be uncertainties regarding the concept of operators.As there are currently many parties involved in the collection process this lead to the issue of who is legally considered as the operator of the recycling stations.

In Sweden, detailed development plans (DDPs) go through a screening process to decide whether their implementation could cause significant environmental impact or not. The criteria in the legislation were studied to see if an environmental impact assessment was needed. This study also investigated 26 DDPs from 12 out of 13 of the municipalities in Östergötland and how they meet up to the demands in relevant legislation, for example the rules for Environmental Impact Assessments. Plans that concerned suburban communities and new housing were selected. The environmental issues highlighted in the plan documents were compared to selected topics from the GIS data base 'Östgötakartan' to see if the assessments made by the municipalities were reasonable judged.

To integrate environmental concerns into non-environmental policy making has become an important policy objective within the European Union. This essay investigates policy instruments in use to achieve environmental policy integration in the EU's transport sector respectively fisheries sector. The point of departure is a theoretical discussion about governance and the use of different policy instruments for environmental management at the EU-level. The focal point is the argumentation that regulatory policy instruments alone cannot achieve environmental policy integration satisfactory. By using Jordan et al's classification of so called "new" environmental policy instruments (market-based instruments, voluntary agreements and ecolabels) as complements to regulatory measures, the essay investigates whether the first-mentioned are used within the two sectors.

During the 90s most companies organized and adopted routines for their environmental work. This work included for example eco-efficiency improvements and the introduction of environmental managing systems. At the UN conference in Rio in 1992 the concept Sustainable development was defined, but it was not until about the year of 2000 that companies in Sweden shifted their work from environmental management to sustainable management. A consequence of this is that they now have to focus on environmental aspect in conjunction with social and economic aspects.The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of what a change of focus to sustainable development means for companies. Has the environmental work suffered in the competition with social/economical aspects under the new sustainable focus? How will the new way of working affect the balance between environmental and social aspects? Changes were studied in five companies by analysing their annual-, environmental- and sustainability reports and through interviews of sustainable managers.

BACKGROUND & During the last century, the Swedish chemical industry has developedPROBLEM: considerably in regard to respecting the environment. Following various discharges and pollutions during the first half of the 20th century, environmental concepts such as CSR, Responsible Care and REACH have developed in order to improve the situation. Today, environmental issues play a central role in the society, but what are the reasons behind this increased environmental commitment? PURPOSE & The purpose of this thesis paper is to study the driving forces behindDELIMITATIONS: the increased environmental awareness in companies. Is this mainly due to stricter legislations, or do factors like pressure from the general public, the industry or customers play a more vital role? Furthermore, do economic incentives exist, that make it interesting for companies to invest in environmental awareness? Since the chemical industry spans over a wide spectrum in regard to environmental issues, this paper will focus on a specific area of the industry.